When Digital Realty wanted to reduce manual processes and maximise their Salesforce and Xactly investments, they turned to ZINKT to make it happen.
Digital Realty is the largest global provider of cloud- and carrier-neutral data center, colocation and interconnection solutions and supports the world’s leading enterprises. Founded in 2004, Digital Realty is one of the fastest growing providers of data infrastructure across a variety of industries, from cloud and information technology services, communications and social networking to financial services, manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and consumer products.
And at the core of Digital Realty’s value proposition is their mission to provide customers with a trusted foundation upon which they can build and grow their businesses. Their customers choose Digital Realty because they trust the company’s reputation for providing a proven Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx™) solution methodology for scaling digital business and efficiently managing data gravity challenges.
Improving processes and enabling growth
As a rapidly growing company, with multiple Salesforce implementations due to acquisitions and mergers, the company found itself in an increasingly complex environment.
“As the company was growing, it became important to intelligently manage the different data needed for the many compensation plan combinations,” said Louis Liao, Senior Director of Sales Operations for Digital Realty.
Reid Hoff, Senior Manager of Sales Operations, agrees. “I would say some of the challenges that we were initially facing was in terms of processing; we didn’t have a smooth process flow,” he said.
Finding the solution with ZINKT
As the company began looking for solutions, one of their primary objectives was to streamline integration. With their growth, they had multiple implementations of Salesforce data and were searching for a solution that would allow them to integrate and take control of all their processes and integration.
When the team reviewed the capabilities of ZINKT, it became apparent that the application had the capability to achieve many of their goals. “Our objective was to try and find a solution that would allow us to take control of the process end-to-end.
And not only that, take ownership,” Liao said. “With ZINKT, one of the things that we were really impressed by was the ability to change the field mapping with just a click of a button; just click the drop-down, select the field that you want.”
This ease-of-use and data flexibility not only gave the Digital Realty team the tools and confidence to tackle their tougher data challenges, but it also created integration, infrastructure, and workflow that will help make their ZINKT and Xactly Incent solution future-proof. As the company continues to grow, it can do so with the confidence that their compensation data and integration is well-managed and scalable with ZINKT.
“ZINKT has streamlined how we interact with our data and how we process our data.” Reid Hoff, Senior Manager of Sales Operations, Digital Realty
The ZINKT customer experience
Sitting in Salesforce and communicating with Xactly Incent data, ZINKT is committed to empowering Salesforce Admins, enabling them to review, make changes, and adjust compensation data, upstream and right inside Salesforce, with governance and oversight tools built right in. ZINKT also segregates steps of the sales process from the commission process, enabling Admins to take ownership of their data and the governance processes. With such a powerful application, you might expect implementation to be difficult or painful. Not with ZINKT.
“I would say [with ZINKT] there was a very high level of service,” explained Louis Liao. “We had multiple calls; the team was very close, hand-holding us all the way through.”
Reid Hoff expands on this. “ZINKT was there to address any issues quickly; to find the remedy. I saw response times within just a few hours and a typical remedy within a day or so. It was a great experience.”
ZINKT and Xactly Incent: together in perfect harmony
To help manage some of the complexity of their business processes, the Digital Realty team uses Xactly Incent for their compensation and incentive management. ZINKT has been designed to work seamlessly with Xactly Incent by creating a Salesforce layer that sits on top of Xactly Connect, creating bi-directional integration between Salesforce and Xactly Incent. ZINKT combines upstream activities, before the data goes into Xactly Incent.
This integration helps reduce some of the complexity and complications of data management and governance. Reid Hoff notes that the added functionality and ease-of-use has seen an increase in usage of Xactly Incent across the organization.
“I definitely see more logins,” says Reid. “And a higher utilization of Xactly Incent with people reviewing their data and incentive statements.” Louis Liao confirms this: “Another benefit of ZINKT is we have more control of our end-to-end process … now within a few clicks inside of Salesforce, everything just works. It’s just so much easier.”
ZINKT helps make business processes more efficient and more user-friendly. Where there used to be challenges in the past to get their incentive payroll files ready on time as well as allow time for their sales reps to review, the Digital Realty team now feels better prepared and in control of the processes. “[With] ZINKT we now can give our sales reps more time to review their incentives, prior to submitting to payroll. I feel this gives them more confidence in the information,” explains Hoff.
ZINKT and Xactly Incent increase trust and confidence
Digital Realty has utilized the solution to help increase confidence and trust within the sales teams. As Reid Hoff explains, “In terms of questions [from Sales Representatives], we’ve definitely seen a lower number of questions. I feel the Reps have a higher confidence in the data now that they have more time to review.”
The Digital Realty team has also reduced the time and effort they spend on manual calculations. “I feel that I’m spending less time in Excel where I used to manually work with data. Now I spend the same amount of time or less in Salesforce using ZINKT to do those same things,” said Hoff.
ZINKT provides better controls and audit trails. ZINKT had an impact on reporting and auditing, and the way the Digital Realty team approaches it. Reid Hoff goes on to explain, “At this point, I use the ZINKT tool, as well as some of the reports in Salesforce created through the ZINKT tool, for more of our control audit purposes. So, in the sense where our Accounting team needs the data, [ZINKT] allows me to seamlessly pull a report of all the orders, or any information that they have. I think a next step for us would be expanding access to the tool for specific individuals on our Audit team in Accounting, so they have that ability to access and view the information as well.”
ZINKT has made a real, measurable impact. At the end of the day, the ZINKT implementation at Digital Realty was an overwhelming success. From the customer’s point of view, the Digital Realty team felt they received high-touch, quality service and support. By adding crucial visibility to the upstream processes, uncovering gaps and enabling improvements, and replacing manual data loads from multiple Salesforce instances, the Digital Realty team felt the ZINKT team demonstrated their skills as experts in integration and implementation.
Just as importantly, ZINKT enabled better collaboration in Salesforce, enforcing revenue governance, and meeting internal compliance and controls requirements, delivering a 40% reduction in administration time.
- ZINKT replaced manual data loads from multiple Salesforce instances, creating a future-proof, fully scalable solution that supports their growth plans
- ZINKT enabled Digital Realty to fully own their Xactly solution and move away from having to reconfigure their existing platform
- ZINKT added crucial visibility to the upstream processes, uncovering gaps and enabling improvements
- ZINKT improved how Digital Realty interacted with their upstream data, reducing the number of spreadsheets and manual uploads
- ZINKT helped improve the sales experience by providing more time for the sales reps to review the data and freeing time for additional steps in the review process
- ZINKT helped deliver a 40% reduction in administration time
Want to learn more about ZINKT and discover how we can make your business better? Drop us a line at inquiry@zinkt.com and we’d be glad to give you a demonstration and evaluation.
